I don’t think W.H.G. Kingston, author of Alone on an Island, found it hard either–he seems to have written several and also taken credit for his wife’s translation of some of Jules Verne’s. Unfortunately his ease with the subject did not, at least in this case, produce a satisfying book.

Harry Gurton is a nice boy with religious inclinations, which will no doubt be useful to him when he’s alone of his desert island. First, though, we have to get him here.

Let’s start by killing off his parents–unnamed diseases, within a few months of each other. Then let’s commission him as a midshipman on a privateer. Let’s provide him with a pocket-sized bible and a warning about the immorality of sailors (they swear a lot) both courtesy of his friendly local minister. With all that taken care of, we can send him to sea.

Now we must make the ship as uncomfortable ass possible. Everyone swears a lot. The officers are relentlessly awful to the sailors. The surgeon leaves the ship after a difference of opinion with some of the officers, and Harry is the only person willing to nurse the sailors when they get sick. His fellow midshipman threatens to destroy his pocket bible. Harry tries to be friendly to everyone, but relations between the officers and the crew get worse and worse. So: it’s mutiny time.

One of the sailors he nursed through an illness lashes him to a mast to get him out of the way. Then the crew murders the rest of the officers. Then they give Harry the choice of becoming a mutineer or being marooned on a nearby island. He chooses the latter, as he’s uncomfortable with the murdering and the swearing. So his sailor friend assembles the world’s most comprehensive care package and puts him ashore.

The one thing I really want from a Robinsonade is the mechanics of survival, in exhaustive detail. How is the protagonist starting a fire? Building shelter? What do they eat? Are they identifying plants? Are they making tools to hunt with? I want to know everything. There should also be elements of struggle–to gather building materials, to search for a missing companion, to familiarize themselves with the collection of legal tomes that was washed ashore in a packing case. Whatever. Those being my priorities, reading Alone on an Island was a frustrating experience.

Harry has it too easy. He’s got guns and fishing equipment, tent canvas, vegetabl seeds and saucepans. He’s got several months’ worth of salt beef and pork. He’s happy to find eggs, not because he needs the food, but because they’ll be “a pleasant addition to his larder.” At some point he thinks to himself that he’d like a cup of tea, so he looks through his stuff and finds that his sailor friend has given him a big bag of tea and another of cocoa. There’s just something about about being able to make hot chocolate on a desert island that suggests Kingston is missing the point. Want to know how this lone fifteen-year-old builds a house? Well, so do I. All we get is “He began putting up his house. [Three sentences about hunting and fishing.] [Three sentences about the garden.] He had now got up his house.”

There are tantalizing glimpses of the kind of detail I want. Harry’s first effort at cooking fails, and he learns that it’s better to boil his salt beef than to roast it. He knows it’s going to be hard to grow things in the sandy soil, so he burns the weeds he’s pulled and uses the ashes as fertilizer. Gathering salt is a little difficult, but eventually he has enough to let him preserve some fish he’s caught. It’s easier to dry or smoke fish, but he prefers the salted fish. I think Kingston was capable of writing the kind of book I wanted. The real problem here is that he’s moving too fast.

Harry establishes himself with little effort and a fair amount of prayer, and then we skip forward three years to another shipwreck, which brings Harry’s sailor friend to live on the island with him. Then, after some bible-reading, we skip forward another couple of years, and the pair is rescued. The sailor becomes a missionary, Harry gets a job, the end. This is a really short book, and it feels like Kingston managed that by cutting out most of the parts I wanted to read.

So, here’s my verdict: Alone on an Island isn’t terrible, but it left my Robinsonade itch unscratched. I’ll try to report back with something more successful.

So, if you’d rather be surprised–repeatedly–stop here and go read the book. If you’re not worried about spoilers, sit down. Stay a while. I’m about to recap the first quarter of the book in absolutely bonkers detail.

First of all, there’s a princess. She was Elizabeth Courtenaye, but her grandmother married her off to an Italian prince who very promptly died. This is a favorite gambit of the Williamsons, who love a virgin with the rights of a widow. The grandma promptly dies, too, and Elizabeth is left with nothing but a title, a beautiful and historic estate in Devonshire, and her exceedingly good looks. Oh, and an enemy: a distant American cousin who used to be a cowboy and has red hair and black eyebrows.

On the advice of her lawyer’s wife, Elizabeth rents the estate to the cousin and becomes a “brightener”–a sort of professional society problem solver who can use her title and unimpeachably blue blood for the benefit of her clients–nouveaux riches trying to break into society, or American millionaires trying to marry members of it. Roger Fane is the latter, and he’s in love with Elizabeth’s friend Lady Shelagh Leigh. Her guardians don’t like him, so Elizabeth helps him organize a yacht trip that’s intended to soften them up.

Things take a turn for the weird almost immediately. An object floating in the sea near them turns out to be neither bird nor plane nor shark, but a coffin. They bring it on board, where it will hang out in Roger’s bathroom and make everyone super uncomfortable until they can hand it over to the authorities at the next port. The atmosphere is strained, and Elizabeth is pleased to be able to escape to her stateroom at the end of the day. That is, she would be pleased, if the room didn’t reek of brandy and there wasn’t a stranger in her bed.

On closer examination, Elizabeth recognizes the stranger as the German spy who tried to burn her house down a couple of years ago. I haven’t mentioned this incident because it’s not actually relevant. Linda the former German spy is here because she’s Roger’s wife who faked her death in a train crash years ago, and now that he’s a millionaire she’d like to come back to life and scotch his romance with Shelagh. So Elizabeth goes to find Roger, all, “Hey, awkward thing, your dead wife is in my cabin,” and then Linda the spy pops up behind her and says, “Not anymore, I’m not!” and Elizabeth throws up her hands and leaves them to it. After a while Roger shows up at Elizabeth’s door and he’s like, “So, super awkward thing: my dead wife is in my cabin and this time she’s actually dead.” Linda the spy has poisoned herself and framed Roger for her death.

Scandal and a murder charge seem inevitable, but then Elizabeth has a bright idea: why not put this inconvenient dead body in that very convenient coffin? Whoever’s in there can be thrown into the sea, and if they’re found, no one will think they have anything to do with Roger & Co., because they don’t. So Roger goes away to swap the corpses, but soon he’s back at Elizabeth’s door, because he needs to show her what was in the coffin. It’s not a corpse at all–it’s a pile of heirlooms that were stolen from Elizabeth’s estate. People suspected Elizabeth of stealing the things herself, for the insurance money, but having them show up in an unattended coffin enables her to instantly deduce who was really responsible.

Roger successfully disposes of his wife’s corpse and gets engaged to Shelagh, and as soon as the yacht trip is over, Elizabeth takes her heirlooms off to Devonshire to confront the thieves. This is, for various reasons, a bad idea, and Elizabeth lands herself in a scrape from which she has to be rescued by the cowboy cousin, who maybe isn’t so bad after all. Then she goes on to have several more adventures that strive to be as wild as this one, and almost manage it. I don’t know what else to say–or rather, if I try to say more I’ll end up recounting the rest of the plot. In sum: I recommend this book.

If you don’t remember, Charles Norris Williamson was an early motoring journalist, and he and his wife Alice Muriel wrote a number of novels together. About half of them were about attractive young people sightseeing in motorcars and falling in love with each other. Knowing this about them is more than usually important.

But first, our heroine: her name is Barribel MacDonald, she has a lot of very red hair, and she’s been brought up in seclusion by a strict grandmother. Barrie thinks her mother is dead, but when she finds out that she only ran away to be an actress, Barrie decides to run away, too, and meet her. She almost immediately runs into Ian Somerled, a very nice painter/architect/millionaire who knows that Barrie’s mother is the famous Barbara Ballantree MacDonald, or “Mrs. Bal,” and suspects that lady won’t be pleased to have a beautiful grown-up daughter on her hands.

Somerled brings Barrie to the house of his friend Mrs. Aline West, a famous author who co-writes novels with her brother, Basil Norman. They’re about to set off on a motor tour of Scotland in Somerled’s car, gathering material for their next book. Sound familiar? Aline is in love with Somerled–or whatever passes for love among villainesses–and dismayed to find that he expects to bring Barrie along on their tour–at least until they get to Edinburgh, where Mrs. Bal is starring in a new play.

Barrie and Somerled enthuse over Carlyle and Burns and fairies together, and fall in love. Aline and Basil fight over their book because Basil wants to make Barrie the heroine and also he writes all their best bits, but Aline is the boss of him–at which point I started asking, “Alice Williamson, what are you doing?”

I never got an answer, but I don’t mind, because this is classic Williamsons and I really do enjoy them. If you enjoyed Set in Silver you’ll enjoy this, too–it’s approximately the same book.

I’m so fond of Wells, but she’s so frustrating as a mystery writer. I know mysteries are supposed to be her Thing, but they don’t play to her strengths, and she does the same things over and over.

The Bronze Hand takes place aboard a steamship called The Pinnacle as it crosses from New York to Liverpool with several thousand passengers, although we’re mostly concerned with a small circle of first class ones. The most important of these are millionaire businessman Oscar Cox, and attractive but aloof Maisie Forman, both traveling alone. Early in the trip, Cox shows off a copy of a bronze hand by Rodin: a fetish he hopes brings him more good luck than bad. Later, someone claws off his face with it.

There’s no apparent connection between Cox and Maisie, but if there were no actual connection, she wouldn’t be in the book. And the more Wells mysteries you’ve read, the less likely the twist is to be any kind of surprise.

The Bronze Hand isn’t online–it was published in 1926–and it’s not worth seeking out, but I’m not mad at it, and when I finished it I got a couple of hours of sleep. I recommend it only if you happen to end up with a copy and don’t care if your light entertainment isn’t very good.

I can’t find out much about Edwin Bateman Morris, but he has an intriguing list of titles, and he was apparently considered worthy of Coles Phillips cover art. And while Our Miss York didn’t wow me, it has a lot of great elements.

Margaret York is an orphan, reluctantly adopted by an uncle who has no patience for children, and less money than he once did. She grows up industrious and efficient, in contrast to her friend David Bruce, who has a moderate income and drifts from hobby to hobby without ever settling down to work at anything. When Margaret’s uncle dies, she takes a stenography course and goes to work at the Waring Company. She learns the business as thoroughly as she can, and draws the attention of Willis Potter, the director, who gives her advice and steers her towards new opportunities–though whether for her benefit or his own, it’s not always clear.

Margaret does well–has some adventures, reconnects with her childhood friend David, makes friends with an older businesswoman–but, as books like this too often do, Our Miss York narrows down to the old business or family question, and the answer is a little too much of a foregone conclusion. Also, I would have liked to see Morris tie together and follow through on threads that he only casts in the same direction, like how Margaret’s upbringing–or lack of it–influences her. But it’s hard to complain about a book full of people being good at things, where the heroine gets to have both personal and professional success, and also pilot a motorboat. I don’t love Our Miss York, but I do recommend it.

You know how Ten Dollars Enough can drag a little when there are too many recipes in a row? Dora’s Housekeeping never stops dragging. I recommending getting your cookbook-in-novel’s-clothing fix elsewhere.

Oh, you want to know what it’s about? Well, Dora Greenwood is a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with four younger siblings. Her mother is sent abroad to recover from an illness, and Dora takes over as housekeeper. She’s got a helpful aunt and cousin next door, but she has trouble finding and keeping a good cook, and she still has to go to school.

I liked that Dora has the capacity to be a bit of a brat–sure, you’re definitely the person most affected by your servant’s mother’s illness–and that her father is a little finicky and not always as nice as one would wish. But Kirkland really looks down on the servants, and there’s too many recipes to too little story.

This is a sort of a sequel to Six Little Cooks; or, Aunt Jane’s Cooking Class, in which Dora’s helpful aunt teaches Dora’s cousins to cook. I think I won’t read it.

I think a lot of you are going to read this and enjoy it. It’s narrated by Leslie Brennan, a nineteen-year-old orphan who is told by her guardian that she must go out and earn her own living for two years under the terms of her father’s will. Leslie’s never done a stroke of work in her life, but she’s not one to back down from a challenge, so she goes to New York, finds an inexpensive place to live, and enrolls in business school.

She has a hard time learning stenography, but she sticks to it, adds language lessons to her curriculum, and eventually impresses her teacher. Similarly, she’s put off by the people around her at first, but soon makes some good friends: Minnie, her boarding house table-mate, looks out for Leslie and teaches her lots of things she ought to know–without looking up to or down on Leslie. Their friendship feels real. Then there’s another boarding house resident, a nice boy from Chicago named Jimmie, and a couple of girls from the business school: Celia, who is a socialist but has a sense of humor about it, and Antoinette, who gives Leslie some long-overdue sewing lessons. By the time Leslie graduates, she loves the opportunities her new life has given her. She’s stronger and more sensible, but also more aware of her shortcomings. And when little bits of drama come her way, they teach her things without feeling contrived or preachy.

Her job search isn’t quick, and she’s beginning to think about lowering her standards when an advertisement sends her–and a bunch of other secretarial hopefuls–out to a big house in the Bronx. There, she verbally spars with red-headed inventor Ewan Kennedy, and he hires her on the spot. Mr. Kennedy is alternately rude and contrite, his two servants are darlings, and it turns out that Leslie has been prepared well for the job. Every time she feels like she can’t do something, Mr. Kennedy says something that makes her angry enough to want to prove herself. It’s delightful, and Leslie thrives.

The title plot feels like an afterthought. It’s similar to the adventure of the heroine in The Enchanted Barn, but without that bad taste in the mouth that Grace Livingston Hill sometimes leaves me with. It’s not as good as the rest of the book, but it’s plenty good enough. And then–yes, the romance. Yes, the love interest acting out of character. Yes, that irritating insistence that they’ve been in love all along, when it’s so much better that they weren’t. But I’m not too upset, because most of The Blue Envelope is a joy.

Gladiola is that classic thing in literature, the gifted child who springs forth from a terrible family. It’s not clear how much of their awfulness is due to her Native America forebears, but the implications are pretty bad. She spends the first ten years of her life hating the squalor she lives in, and then escapes to Boston. There she has a stroke of remarkable luck in running into Mary Page, a young woman who does settlement work. Mary and her housekeeper, Molly, take Gladiola in and try to teach her how to be a person in society without changing who she is inside.

It’s her insides–her pride and sense of justice and love of beauty–that lead her to make friends with Dudley Crane, a talented young sculptor. He hires her to clean his studio, but really he becomes another of Gladiola’s teachers, and he and Mary and Molly do a pretty great job of raising her, all things considered.

Dudley (inevitably) falls in love with Gladiola when she’s (uncomfortably) fifteen.

“Juliet was married before she was fifteen,” Dudley insists.

“I never knew a man yet who wanted to fall in love with a very young girl who didn’t drag Juliet in,” says Mary Page. Mary Page is pretty great.

Gladiola grows up beautiful and talented and attractive to more than just Dudley, but the one man who catches her attention is Dwight Richardson, a snobby aesthete who appreciates her beauty and talent, but isn’t as interested in her as a person. Everyone but Gladiola knows this is a bad idea, but at the same time you can see why she and Dwight like each other, and I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t going to work out.

Then we veer in the direction of melodrama, and Sawyer loses me a little, and I think that’s why I’ve written this much without really having any idea what I want to say. There are parts of Gladiola Murphy I liked a lot. There are parts I disliked. I would love to hear some opinions. And I plan to read more by Ruth Sawyer.

When we meet Constance, she’s left her ex-husband Frank in New York City, and is returning to her family home in a college town in the midwest. It’s clear from the beginning–although not to Constance–that this isn’t going to be as comfortable as she hopes. Her father is crotchety and controlling, her younger sister, Rose, is running a little wild, and her mother is having a hard time running the house on limited resources. And then, many of the people she knew don’t exactly approve of her now that she’s a divorcée. Her best friend, Sally, is unchanged, in spite of two children and a pregnancy-in-progress, but Sally’s husband doesn’t like having Constance around, so they only spend time together when he’s out.

Frank’s generous alimony makes things easier, and Constance is glad to lessen the financial load on her parents, but it brings problems, too. It gives her brother Wilbur an excuse to bully her into lending him money, and bears on the balance of power in the house. And then a meeting with another divorcée sets Constance wondering if she should be accepting any alimony at all.

And then there’s Suzanne, the small daughter of one of Constance’s school friends. Suzanne’s mother is dead, and she lives with an aunt who loves her but doesn’t have the time or resources to give her the care she needs. Constance isn’t sure she wants to be married, but she definitely wants a child, and, increasingly, this child.

The man she contemplates marrying is Alison Sharland, an old friend who starts visiting Constance not long after she returns home. There are things that are attractive about him, and things that aren’t, and it isn’t clear whether he wants to marry her, but she spends a lot of time thinking about him. She spends a lot of time thinking about a lot of things, and finding new, more sensible ways of looking at most of them (her opinions on the subject of Class are meant to be sensible, but to the modern reader they’re just xenophobic).

I picked up Support because the description I read promised a heroine who went out and worked, but as I read I got frustrated, because it takes her a long time to get to that point. Now that I’ve finished, I appreciate the slow pace. I was no more frustrated with Constance’s surroundings than she was, and the sense and confidence and inner peace she’s struggled to gain make her quick business success feel earned, in a way it wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is a small book. I don’t mean that badly. A big book would give you an enthralling plot, or new ideas, or deep feelings, or a wider scope, and without any of those, Support can feel limited. But it covers its own ground well, and I’m glad I stuck with it through the several times I considered putting it down.

Bill Bronson is a fur trapper in, I think, present-day British Columbia. He’s hoping to someday find his father’s gold mine, and also take revenge on the man who killed his father and made off with the loose gold.

Virginia Tremont is a young woman from an unspecified US city. She and her guardian, Kenly Lounsbury, hire Bill to help them look for Harold Lounsbury, Kenly’s nephew and Virginia’s fiance. He disappeared after coming to this part of the world six years ago, so there’s not much hope, but Virginia hasn’t given up. Kenly Lounsbury’s motives are less clear. He’s financing the expedition, but it’s hard to imagine him caring about anything but his own consequence and comfort.

Bill falls in love with Virginia at first sight, but keeps it to himself. It’s pretty obvious that he approves of her sense and spirit, though, especially when the only others with them are the whiny Lounsbury, and the shifty cook, Vosper. Virginia appreciates Bill, too, and her steadfastness and appreciation of nature create a friendly bond between them.

Winter seems to be arriving in the mountains a little bit early, but they’re doing okay. And then disaster strikes–well, the first disaster, anyway. Bill and Virginia (brave, trying to do things) get swept into a river, while Lounsbury and Vosper (cowardly, lazy) hang back and watch. Bill (superhumanly, and not for the last time) manages to get himself and Virginia to the opposite shore, somewhere downstream. The other two pack up as soon as is seemly, leaving behind everything they don’t feel like carrying, and head back to civilization.

Bill and Virginia have ended up near one of the cabins that Bill maintains, and it’s well-stocked with supplies. The two of them have similar tastes, and with food, shelter, a stove and a phonograph, they get along pretty well. Bill teaches Virginia to shoot and snowshoe, she spontaneously learns to cook, and they wait for the river to freeze over.

And then–yes. Bill finds Harold Lounsbury. He’s fine. He didn’t go home because he didn’t care to. He’s an alcoholic, and he’s living with a native woman who seems to be largely without agency. The depiction of the First Nations people in this book is really, really bad, folks. Worth steering clear of the book for. The only part of Harold’s living arrangements that Edison Marshall doesn’t seem to disapprove of is the power imbalance.

Bill promised to bring Harold to Virginia, so he does, but none of the three are all that happy with the arrangement. Then: a food shortage. A bear attack. Bill goes blind. Harold hatches a plot with his native pals. Virginia gets shot. It’s exhausting. I kept thinking the book was over, and it wasn’t.

We do finally get an ending, and it’s fine, but by that time I didn’t care anymore. I think there are reasons you might want to read this book, but I can no longer remember them.